Joy Huerta brings herself to the music of 'Real Women Have Curves'
The Grammy-winning singer, known as one half of the pop duo Jesse & Joy, makes her Broadway debut co-writing the score for this adaptation of the play and film.
Mexican pop star Joy Huerta is learning how to "make it work" as a theatrical writer, to borrow the title of a song from her Broadway-debut show. Luckily, Real Women Have Curves, adapted from the same-named Josefina López play and HBO film, lets her use music to celebrate the experiences and communities she already knows best.
Huerta is one half of the Grammy Award and six-time Latin Grammy-winning duo Jesse & Joy, which she formed with her brother in 2005. The Real Women Have Curves creators tapped Huerta over five years ago for her vibrant Mexican pop sound, which gives the musical a modern edge even as, like its source material, it remains set in the late '80s.
She teamed up with fellow Broadway newcomer Benjamin Velez as her co-songwriter/orchestrator, and together, they expanded the show's musical landscape to weave in various Latin styles. Main character Ana and her mother, Carmen, are Mexican, and their friends and relatives at their family's dress factory in Los Angeles — where Carmen wants Ana to stay and work instead of going off to college in New York — encompass a multitude of backgrounds, and, therefore, different sounds.
"[The characters are from] many different [Mexican] regions and different parts of Latin America, so it was really fun to dig into that," Huerta said. "It's such a beautiful play about representation, but mostly a family story and a story anyone can relate to."
To that end, many of the musical's songs are bouncy earworms meant to make it easy for Latin pop fans and newcomers alike to bop along to the women's stories. Following a pop-up Real Women Have Curves concert outside the James Earl Jones Theatre, Huerta spoke with New York Theatre Guide about how she crafted the score and shared sneak peeks into what to expect from some of the songs.
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Was writing for theatre a different challenge than writing pop music?
When they first approached me [...] I read the play, and then we went into lockdown for COVID, and then I saw the movie. I was like, "How is this going to be a musical? It doesn't need anything." I was freaking out, honestly. I asked for someone because I was like, "Look, I know how to write music. I've been writing music my whole life, but I've never done theatre in my life."
They paired me up with the wonderful Benjamin Velez, and we became a really nice team. As soon as we were going through it and not panicking, knowing I could share responsibility, things just started flowing. And it was a great job done by [book writers] Lisa Loomer and Nell Benjamin that it felt so natural where the songs should be.
How did you devise the sound of Real Women Have Curves?
It was about getting each character a sound. Once I figured out what the sound would be for each person, it became so much easier to write for them.
You can give all the backstory you want. What if the mom, maybe, had dreams of being in a mariachi band? Maybe we can throw some elements of that to her. Ana, she's the youngest of the bunch, so maybe she's going to sound more contemporary, and same for [Ana's love interest] Henry. And what about the women in the factory? We need to give them a sound as an entity, a community. It became super fun to write that way because it was just like, what hat are we putting on today?
Do you have a favorite song in the show?
It depends what mood I'm in. There's one called "Oye Muchacha" at the end of Act 1 that is quite epic and a pop cumbia.
There's a song called "Flying Away," and it's Ana's, our hero's, "I want" song. There's another song called "I Got It Wrong" at the end of the show. I don't want to say much because it's a spoiler alert!
[There's] the last one that we did [...] called "Make It Work." The fun thing about that song is that we took the song from the women of the factory and we perverted it in a way, because it's the antagonist singing it, so it's a different type of song.
Can fans of your music expect anything different from your usual sound in this show?
I want to feel like we created a specific sound for [the characters], and that it's going to be unique to them, but there's absolutely no way I could entirely separate myself from this particular project. It was really fun to be able to bring my sound into the sound of the women.
As a Mexican artist, what is it like for you to tell Mexican and Latin American stories on stage through music?
I'm Mexican American and still from Mexico. There are so many different areas of the country that have different types of sounds. I would never just go and do it on my own; I would always go to specialists. But they were looking for something more my sound — more pop and Mexican American and contemporary — because we didn't want to make it sound from the '80s, although I was very tempted.
For me, it was just a matter of showcasing things we have in my country, and they're blended in a way that the audience won't feel alienated in terms of sound. They feel like, "I could have fun with that."
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This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Top image credit: Joy Huerta. (Photo courtesy of production)
In-article image credit: Huerta performing with the Broadway cast of Real Women Have Curves. (Photos by Avery Brunkus)
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